Unemployment and casualization: A great challenge to the left

By István Mészáros, speech given to seminar organised by Workers
Left Unity-Iran, 18 March 2000

Contents

Foreword

1. The ‘Globalization’ of Unemployment

2. The myth of flexibility: downward equalization of the
differential rate of exploitation

3. From the tyranny of necessary labour time to emancipation
through disposable time

Notes

Foreword

I have chosen this subject for our discussion for two main
reasons. First, because the issue concerns all
shades of the left. For in our time no section of the workforce can
consider itself immune to the dehumanizing hardship of unemployment
and casualization. In fact casualization is more appropriately
called in some languages precarization, although it is in
general tendentiously misrepresented as desirable flexible
employmnent. A few months ago some 25.000 employees of Westminster
Bank had to face the prospect of redundancy; today the workers of the
Rover car company—a bankrupt part of the proud BMW transnational
corporation—are thrown to the wolves of total insecurity. The
question is not whether unemployment or flexible
casualization is going to threaten the people still in employment
but when are they going to share the predicament of enforced
precarization.

The second main reason why we must concern ourselves with
this issue is because it represents an insurmountable structural
problem for capital. Thus it is unthinkable that the left could work
out a viable strategy for the future without giving a central place to
the vital issue of unemployment and casualization.

Today I intend to consider three principal aspects of what is at
stake.

The globalization of unemployment and casualization,
affecting even the capitalistically most developed parts of the world.

The myth of flexibility with which the bitter pill is
sugar-coated. For what we are talking about is in fact the grave
socioeconomic trend of the downward equalization of the
differential rate of exploitation.

The only feasible solution to the problems we face is to move from
regulating socioeconomic interchanges by submitting to the tyranny of
necessary labour time (also called necessary
labour) to emancipation through disposable time as
the positive alternative to capital's mode of social metabolic
reproduction.

As our point of departure, we may consider the question of reducing
the working week to 35 hours which, not by accident, came to the fore
in recent times.

1. The globalization of unemployment

Socialists in several European countries—as well as in North and
South America—are fighting for the objective of reducing labour
time to 35 hours per week without loss of pay. This important
strategic demand is by no means free from its difficulties. For it
highlights both the pressing problem of unemployment all over the
world, and the contradictions of the socioeconomic system which by its
own perverse necessity imposes on countless millions the hardship and
suffering that goes with unemployment.

Thus the fight for 35 Hours Work cannot be a traditional trade
unionist demand, confined to the long established machinery of wage
negotiations. On the contrary, it has to be fully aware not only of
the magnitude of the task and the long-term implications of the issues
at stake, but also of the unavoidably tenacious resistance of the
socioeconomic order which must follow its own imperatives in order to
nullify whatever concession might be made in the legal/political
sphere under conditions temporarily favourable to trade unions and to
their left-wing political representatives. Understandably, therefore,
in Italy for instance, the party of Rifondazione in its way
of raising the issue simultaneously underlines the concern with
increased employment and improved conditions of living (per
l'occupazione & per migliorare la vita) and the
necessity of changing society (per cambiare la
società) in order to secure the envisaged objective of
shortened working time on a viable social foundation. For lasting
success in this matter is feasible only through a sustained
interchange—a dialectical reciprocity—between the fight
for the immediate objective of significantly reduced labour-time and
the progressive transformation of the established social order which
cannot help resisting and nullifying all such demands.

Those who deny the legitimacy of these demands, extolling instead the
virtues of their cherished system, continue to idealize the US model
for solving the unemployment problem as well as all social evils
inseparable from it. Yet even a cursory examination of the actual
state of affairs reveals that the reassurances idealizing the US
belong to the realm of fantasy. For, as an Editorial of The
Nation stressed it:

The poverty rate last year, 13.7 percent, was higher than in 1989,
despite seven years of nearly uninterrupted growth. Approximately 50
million Americans—19 percent of the population—live below
the national poverty line. Those in poverty include one in four
children under the age of 18, one in five senior citizens and three of
every five single parent households. In constant dollars, average
weekly earnings for workers went from a high of $315 in 1973 down to
$256 in 1996, a decline of 19 percent. Last year the poorest fifth of
families saw their income decline by $210, while the richest 5 percent
gained an average of $6,440 (not counting their capital
gains). … The number of Americans without health insurance stood
at 40.6 million in 1995, an increase of 41 percent since the
mid-seventies. In 1995, almost 80 percent of the uninsured were in
families where the head of household held a job.1

This is how rosy the American model really looks once you are willing
to open your eyes. We may also add here a most significant figure
supplied recently by the Budget Office of the US Congress,
unobjectionable even to capital's worst apologists. It tells us
that the income of the richest one percent of the population
is equivalent to that of the bottom forty percent. And even
more importantly, it also transpires that this appalling figure has
actually doubled in the last two decades, as the consequence
of capital's structural crisis. Thus no amount of cynical
camouflage of the deteriorating conditions of work, no matter how
eagerly misrepresented as blessed flexibility, can hide the
serious implications of this trend for the future of capital-expansion
and accumulation.

Naturally, unemployment statistics can be fiddled with, or quite
arbitrarily defined and redefined, not only in America, but in every
single country of so-called advanced capitalism. In Britain,
for instance, even the professional apologists of the capital
system—the editors of the London Economist—had to
admit that the unemployment figures have been 33 times revised
by the government in order to make them look better. Not to mention
the fact that anybody who works for 16 hours per week in Britain
counts as enjoying full time employment. And even more
strikingly in Japan—a country until recently hailed as a
paradigm case of dynamic advanced capitalism—anybody
who works for wages for over one hour in the last
week of the month is not included in the unemployment
statistics.2 But who can be fooled by
such devices of economic and political manipulation? For no matter how
concerted and devious the misrepresentation of the existing state of
affairs, the potentially very grave challenge of unemployment cannot
be avoided in any one of even the capitalistically most advanced
countries. Thus, whatever the apologetic statistical figures might
suggest, it is now no longer possible to conceal alarm about the
constantly rising record of unemployment in Japan and the deepening
economic recession that goes with it.

In reality the dramatic rise in unemployment in the capitalistically
advanced countries is not a recent phenomenon. It appeared on the
horizon—after two and a half decades of relatively undisturbed
postwar capital-expansion—with the onset of the structural
crisis of the capital system as a whole. It appeared as the
necessary and ever-worsening feature of this structural
crisis. Accordingly, I argued way back in 1971 that under the
unfolding conditions of unemployment

the problem is no longer just the plight of unskilled labourers but
also that of large numbers of highly skilled workers who are now
chasing, in addition to the earlier pool of unemployed, the
depressingly few available jobs. Also, the trend of
rationalizing amputation is no longer confined to the
peripheral branches of ageing industry but embraces some of the
most developed and modernized sectors of production—from
ship-building and aviation to electronics, and from engineering to
space technology. Thus we are no longer concerned with the
normal, and willingly accepted, by-products of growth and
development, but with their driving to a halt; nor indeed with the
peripheral problems of pockets of underdevelopment but with a
fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production as a
whole which turns even the latest achievements of development,
rationalization and modernization into paralizing
burdens of chronic underdevelopment. And most important of it all, the
human agency which finds itself at the receiving end is no longer the
socially powerless, apathetic and fragmented multitude of
underprivileged people but all categories of skilled and
unskilled labour: i.e., objectively the total labour force of
society.3

Since the time when these lines were written we have witnessed a
tenfold increase in unemployment in Britain and elsewhere. As things
stand today, even according to the official—grossly
understated—figures, there are more than 40 million
unemployed in the industrially most developed countries. Of this
figure, Europe accounts for more than 20 million, and
Germany—once eulogized for producing the German
miracle—has passed the 5 million mark. As to a
country like India—highly praised in the traditional organs of
economic wisdom for its achievements as a healthily developing
country—it has no less than 336 million people on its
unemployment register,4 and many more
millions without proper work who should be counted but are not
registered. Moreover, IMF intervention in developing countries,
true to the organization's US dictated mandate, worsens the plight
of the unemployed while pretending to improve the economic conditions
of the countries concerned. As another Editorial of The
Nation had put it:

Mexico's economy may appear to be great, but its people are
hurting. Since the IMF bailout, the middle class has been crushed;
25,000 small businesses have gone belly up; 2 million workers have
lost their jobs over the same time. In dollar terms, wages have
plummeted 40 percent. The IMF had to destroy the domestic economy in
order to save it.5

At the same time, the former postcapitalist countries belonging to the
Soviet type system, from Russia to Hungary—which in the past did
not suffer unemployment, though they had run their economies with high
levels of underemployment—had to accommodate themselves, often
under direct IMF pressure, to the dehumanizing conditions of massive
unemployment. Hungary, for instance, has been congratulated by the
IMF6 for stabilizing unemployment at
about 500.000. In reality the figure is considerably higher, and still
increasing. But even 500.000, in terms of the relatively small
Hungarian population, is equivalent to having 6.5 million unemployed
in Britain or Italy, and something approaching not 5 but 8 million in
Germany. In the Russian Federation the situation is just as bad, and
getting all the time worse, including such outrages as not paying the
wages of miners and other workers for many months. Vietnam presents a
particularly tragic example. For after the heroic victory of its
people over the long and devastating interventionist war of US
imperialism, the peace is being lost under the pressure of capitalist
restoration.7 And even China is no exception
to the general rule of rising unemployment, despite the very special
way in which its economy is politically controlled. A confidential but
leaked report prepared by its Ministry of Labour warns the Chinese
government that within a few years unemployment in the country is
bound to reach the staggering figure of 268
million—pointing also to the danger of major social
explosions to go with it—unless appropriate (but not specified)
measures are adopted to counter the present trend.8

This is how we have reached a point in historical development at which
unemployment is a dominant feature of the capital system as a
whole. In its new modality, it constitutes a close network of
interrelations and interdeterminations whereby it is now impossible to
find partial remedies and solutions to the unemployment problem in
limited areas, in sharp contrast to the postwar decades of development
of a few privileged countries where liberal politicians could speak
about Full Employment in a Free Society.9

In recent years there has been a great deal of talk propagandizing the
universally beneficial virtues of globalization,
misrepresenting the trend of capital's global expansion and
integration as a radically new phenomenon destined to resolve all our
problems. The great irony of the real trend of
development—inherent in capital's logic from the first
constitution of its system centuries ago, reaching its maturity in our
own time in a form inextricably tied up with the system's
structural crisis—is that the productive advancement of this
antagonistic mode of controlling the social metabolism throws an
ever-increasing portion of humanity into the category of
superfluous labour. Already in 1848, in the Communist
Manifesto Marx insisted that

In order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it
under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. …
[But] the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in
society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an
overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to
assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot
help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him,
instead of being fed by him.10

Ironically, thus, the development of by far the most dynamic
productive system in history culminates by rendering an ever growing
number of human beings superfluous to its machinery of
production, although—true to the system's
incorrigibly contradictory character—far from superfluous as
consumers. The historical novelty of the type of unemployment
in the globally completed system is that the contradictions of any
specific part complicates and aggravates the problem in other parts
and, consequently, in the whole. For the need for
unemployment-producing downsizing, etc., necessarily arises
from the antagonistic profit- and accumulation-seeking productive
imperatives of capital which it cannot conceivably renounce, so as to
restrain itself in accordance with rational and humanly gratifying
principles. Capital either maintains its inexorable drive toward its
self-expansionary targets, no matter how devastating the consequences,
or it ceases to be capable of controlling the social metabolism of
reproduction. There can be no half-way house or even the slightest
attention paid to human considerations. This is why the first time
ever in history a dynamic—and in its ultimate implications
dynamically destructive—system of self-expansionary social
metabolic control arises which ruthlessly ejects, if necessary, the
overwhelming majority of humankind from the labour process. This is
the deeply disturbing meaning of globalization.

When capital reaches this stage of development, it has no way of
addressing the causes of its structural crisis; it can only
fiddle with effects and surface manifestations. Accordingly, since
capital cannot feed its slave any longer, the
personifications of its system (to use Marx's expression)
try to resolve the problem by clawing back even the limited benefits
conceded to labour in the form of the Welfare
State—during the postwar period of undisturbed
capital-expansion—by attacking and abolishing the Welfare
State. Thus in the US, the unemployed are compelled to submit to
the dictates of work-fare, if they want to receive any
social benefits. And true to form, in Britain the same shift is being
attempted from Welfare to work-fare by the
government of a party which once considered itself
socialist. Accordingly, when an eight column headline of a British
liberal newspaper (which happens to be very friendly to the government
of New Labour) announces: Jobless told: join Army or lose
benefit,11 that headline gives a
foretaste of the measures in store for the unemployed youth. This,
again, underlines the fact, just like the other aspects of our problem
mentioned so far, that the now fully accomplished globalization of
unemployment and casualization cannot be redressed without the radical
supersession of the capital system itself. Not so many years ago it
was confidently anticipated that all known social evils, even in the
most underdeveloped parts of the world, will be overcome by
universal modernization, in conformity to the US
model. Characteristically, however, we are now confronted by the
diametrical opposite of the projected rosy picture. For the conditions
once confined, in the tales of developmental theory and
governmental wisdom, to the allegedly temporary difficulties of
underdevelopment are now becoming clearly visible even in the
capitalistically most developed countries.

2. The myth of flexibility: downward equalization of the
differential rate of exploitation

On May 19, 1998 the French Parliament passed a law reducing the
working week to 35 hours. Similar legislation is expected also in
Italy in the not too distant future. It would be very naïve, however,
to think that this is the end of the story. For in Paris the move was
immediately described by many economists and business leaders as
economic suicide,12 and in Italy
even before any legislative move the leader of the Confederation of
Italian Industry (Confindustria), Giorgio Fossa made
absolutely clear the intention of his organization to nullify all such
legislation.13 Moreover, Confindustria
President Fossa (whose name in Italian means, most appropriately,
grave) also unashamedly declared (as if it should not be
obvious to everyone who knows his organization) that they intend to
bury the law, if enacted in Parliament, with the help of a grand
coalition which would include the supporters of even the extreme
right-wing parties.14 And true to its customary
cynicism, the London Economist pontificated about the
proposed law like this:

So who really wants Lionel Jospin's 35-hour working week?
Certainly not France's employers, who claim it will increase
labour costs and reduce their competitiveness. Nor the taxpayer, who
suspects he will have to pay higher taxes to finance the scheme. Nor,
increasingly, the unions, who fear it will lead to lower wages and
fewer workers' rights. Nor even the workers, most of whom expect
to continue working as much as before, but with more awkward shifts
and unsocial hours. Even the unemployed, the scheme's supposed
beneficiaries, are wondering how many jobs, if any, it will actually
create. … Mr Jospin finds himself saddled with a scheme not even
he—it is whispered—believes in.15

Apparently, then, the law in question represented a mystery all
round. This we were assured by The Economist on the authority
of the mysterious well-informed whisperers.

Naturally, there are serious difficulties that must be faced by the
labour movement in its struggle for a real reduction in the working
week without loss of pay. But they are of a very different order as
compared with the frightening tales devised by The
Economist and by other spokesmen of the ruling order. The real
obstacles confronting labour in the present and in the near future can
be summed up with two words: flexibility and
deregulation: two of the most cherished slogans of
capital's personifications today in business as well as in
politics. They are meant to sound very attractive and progressive. In
truth, though, they encapsulate the most aggressive anti-labour
aspirations and policies of neo-liberalism, claimed to be as
commendable to every rational being as motherhood and apple-pie. For
flexibility with regard to labour practices—to be
facilitated and enforced through various kinds of
deregulation—amounts in reality to the ruthless
casualization of the labour force. It is often coupled with
authoritarian anti-labour legislation—from Reagan's
suppression of the US air controllers to Margaret Thatcher's long
series of vicious anti-labour laws: characteristically retained by
Tony Blair's New Labour government. And the same people who
call the diffusion of the most precarious labour conditions of
casualization universally beneficial flexibility also
have the nerve to call the practice of authoritarian anti-labour
legislation democracy.

Flexibility is expected to take care of the concession of 35
hours, if for the sake of political contingency it becomes
unavoidable, as seems to be the case in France and Italy. Thus in
France some ministers talk of making the labour market more
flexible, notably by letting employers vary the working week in
accordance with seasonal demand, so that the number of hours worked
weekly would be calculated as an average over the year.16 The same ploy is expected to do the trick in
Italy. At the time of its introduction Italy's Prime Minister
Prodi—later rewarded with the Presidency of the European
Commission—reassured his critics that appropriate
flexibility should be able to counter the negative effects of
the law.

The real concern of the personifications of capital is to promote
labour flexibility and to fight in every possible way against
rigid labour markets. Thus a prominent article in the
Financial Times insists that In both Japan and Europe,
companies are gearing up to shed jobs faster than rigid labour markets
can create them, indicating approvingly that
deregulation may force the pace and adding for the
sake of propagandistic reassurance that Optimists believe
deregulation will eventually lead to the creation of sufficient jobs
in new markets to absorb much of the excess labour. But for this to
happen, Japan will need the kind of labour mobility that
operates in the US.17 (The story of
Renault's takeover of Nissan, bringing with it the sacking of
30.000 Nissan workers, must please the advocates of such remedies, in
that it shows that Japan is moving in the right direction.)
Similarly, an IMF staff paper—enthusiastically reviewed by
The Economist—asserts that studies suggest that
in Europe real wages are only half as flexible as those in
America, and that Europe's workers are much less likely to
move around in search of work than American ones. This
they say while blissfully forgetful of John Kenneth Galbraith's
complaint many years earlier that workers in the US can only blame
themselves for their unemployment because they refuse to move
around as a result of their homing instinct, which ties
them to the place of their upbringing. Nothing seems to change over
decades either in diagnosis or in remedial wisdom. And to complete the
priceless self-serving reasoning, the authors of the IMF staff paper
present their far from reflexive but, rather, automatic Pavlovian
reflex solution in the form of neoliberal capital's wishful
should be projections:

Suppose, for instance, that a government cuts unemployment
benefits. Workers now have a sharper incentive to seek work and so
unemployment should fall. An increase in the number of job seekers
will also put downward pressure on wages. Lower wage costs should, in
turn, boost employment.18

Naturally, as a result of this wonderful shrinking of the wage bill,
we shall live happily ever after. And on the other hand,
if—despite the very real sacrifices of the workers (described in
our quote with the words now have and will)—the
fictitious expectations of should be do not materialize, that
could in no way invalidate the shared theory of the IMF and The
Economist. It would only reveal that the proverbial pigs of the
well-known English adage stubbornly refuse to grow wings, to look like
giant bumble-bees, in order to fly toward capital's wishfully
projected optimistic future.

In the meantime, the real savagery of the system continues unabated,
not only in ejecting more and more people from the labour process but,
with a characteristic contradiction, also lengthening the
time of work, wherever capital can get away with it. To mention a very
important example, in Japan the government has recently introduced a
parliamentary bill to raise the upper limits of the working day,
from 9 hours to 10, and the work week, from 48 to 52
hours. Such a provision will allow a company to compel employees
to work longer hours when the company is busy as long as the total
hours worked in a year do not exceed the fixed limit,19 just like the flexibility merchants
propose it in France, Italy and elsewhere. Moreover, the same bill
also intends to extend so-called discretionary work
schedules in order to allow a company to pay its
white-collar workers for just 8-hours work even though they may
have worked longer.20 Some frightening
examples of the inhuman destructive effects of such discretionary
work are reported from the fields where they are already
operative, now to be extended. For instance a young computer
programmer died of heavy overwork, according to the judgment of the
Tokyo District Court. We read that his average annual working time
was over 3,000 hours. In the three months just before his death, he
worked 300 hours a month. At that time he was engaged in developing a
computer software system for banks.21
Another young man who died of heart failure due to gross overwork,
in the two weeks prior to his death worked on average 16 hours
and 19 minutes a day.22 In the
words of another japanese journal even today

employers impose strict quotas on workers, which means long working
hours and unpaid work put upon the shoulders of the workers. … A
train conductor, for example, working for East Japan Railways Co.,
Japan's biggest railroad company, actually performed his duties
for 14 hours and 5 minutes while he was kept in the workplace for 24
hours and 13 minutes, and the company did not pay him for the rest of
the 10 hours and 8 minutes, saying that these hours are neither
working hours nor rest periods.23

Significantly, in the age of capital's structural crisis even this
level of exploitation is not enough. It must be extended as far as the
labour movement can put up with. In Japan the present bill before
parliament is the biggest attack in the postwar period against
workers' rights.24 No wonder,
therefore, that some Trade Unions are envisaging for themselves a much
more directly political role in the future, compared to their
traditional line in the past. To quote Kanemichi Kumagai, secretary
general of the Japanese National Confederation of Trade Unions:
This year's spring struggle will not just follow what has been
done in the past but will aim to change the trends of
politics and the labour movement, including how Japan's
policies and economy should be. For this we attach greater importance
to achieving workers and trade unions taking actions to have
influence over society.25

Japan is a particularly important example, because we are not talking
about a so-called Third World country about which even the most
callous and ruthlessly exploitative labour practices were always taken
for granted as a matter of course. On the contrary, Japan represents
the second most powerful economy in the world: a paradigm of
capitalistic advancements. And now even in such a country unemployment
is perilously rising and the conditions of work must be made worse
than ever under the long period of postwar development and
capital-expansion, including not only the great intensification of
exploitative work-schedules in the name of flexibility, but
also the—to many people quite incomprehensible—imperative
of a longer working week.

At the roots of this baffling and in some ways self-contradictory
advocacy of flexibility, coupled with rigid
authoritarian labour legislation, we find the vitally important
tendential law of the downward equalization of the differential
rate of exploitation, which becomes sharply pronounced through
capital's ever more destructive globalization in the period of the
system's structural crisis. This is why I wrote in 1971 that

the working classes of some of the most developed
post-industrial societies are getting a foretaste of the real
viciousness of liberal capital. … Thus, the real nature
of the capitalist production relations: the ruthless domination of
labour by capital is becoming increasingly more evident as a global
phenomenon. … The understanding of the development and
self-reproduction of capital's mode of production is quite
impossible without the concept of total social capital …
Similarly, it is quite impossible to understand the manifold and
thorny problems of nationally varying as well as socially stratified
labour without constantly keeping in mind the necessary framework of a
proper assessment, namely the irreconcilable antagonism between total
social capital and the totality of labour.

This fundamental antagonism is inevitably modified in accordance with
(1) the local socio-economic circumstances; (2) the respective
positions of particular countries in the global framework of capital
production; and (3) the relative maturity of the global
socio-historical development. Accordingly, at different periods of
time the system as a whole reveals the workings of a complex set of
objective differences of interest on both sides of the social
antagonism. The objective reality of different rates of
exploitation—both within a given country and in the world
system of capital—is as unquestionable as are the objective
differences in the rates of profit at any particular time
… All the same, the reality of the different rates of
exploitation and profit does not alter the fundamental law itself:
i.e., the growing equalization of the differential rates of
exploitation as the global trend of development of world
capital.

To be sure, this law of equalization is a long-term trend as far as
the global system of capital is concerned. … Let it now suffice
to stress that total social capital should not be confused with
total national capital. When the latter is being affected by a
relative weakening of its position within the global system, it will
inevitably try to compensate for its losses by increasing its specific
rate of exploitation over against the labour force under its direct
control—or else its competitive position is further weakened
within the global framework of total social capital. …
there can be no way out, other than the intensification of the
specific rates of exploitation, which can only lead, both locally and
in global terms, to an explosive intensification of the fundamental
social antagonism in the long run. Those who have been talking about
the integration of the working class—depicting
organized capitalism as a system which succeeded in radically
mastering its social contradictions—have hopelessly
misidentified the manipulative success of the differential rates of
exploitation (which prevailed in the relatively
disturbance-free historic phase of postwar reconstruction and
expansion) as a basic structural remedy.26

As a necessary concomitant of the ongoing globalization of productive
and distributive relations, the downward equalization of the
differential rate of exploitation affects every single
capitalistically advanced country, even the richest ones. There can be
no more room for paternalistically manipulated labour relations,
however traditional and deeply rooted they are supposed
to be, nor indeed for permanently avoiding the severe negative impact
of the ubiquitous structural crisis through relative trade and
technological advantages. Indeed, as an Appeal by some distinguished
intellectuals in an Italian newspaper stressed it, what makes the
situation grave is that casualization and insecurity (la precarietà
e l'insicurezza) grow everywhere in the world of labour:
unsafeguarded and underpaid work is spreading like pools of oil,
while even the most stable work undergoes a pressure toward an
intensification without precedent of its performace, and toward full
availability to a submission to the most diversified working
hours.27

To put it in another way, here we have to face an extremely
significant and far-reaching tendency: the return of absolute
surplus-value, to an increasing extent, in the societies of
advanced capitalism in the last few decades. Professor Augusto
Graziani spoke most eloquently in February 1998, at the Convegno of
Rifondazione in Milan dedicated to the issue of the 35 hours week,
about the labour conditions of the Mezzogiorno in general and
about the frightful exploitation of female labour in Calabria in
particular. His intervention is most relevant to the question of
absolute surplus-value in a capitalistically advanced country,
like Italy, in that some of the highly exploitative labour practices
can be identified also in the industrially most developed North of the
country. In England, at the same time, a recent TV documentary
illustrated the widespread diffusion of child labour,
although it is clearly against the law. Naturally, the law is
not in the least enforced. On the contrary, all kinds of phoney
arguments are promoted in order to indirectly justify such unlawful
pratices. Thus, business interests conduct a vociferous campaign
against the minimum wage in general, with the excuse that its
introduction would make the employment of young people much
worse. Another way of manipulating the same issue, by the
Confederation of British Industry, by the Institute of Directors, and
by the various Think Tank organizations of business, is to
press for the exemption of the young from the minimum wage
legislation, or the concession of much lower minimum wage. Moreover,
the worsening labour conditions of people of all ages in countless
sweatshops—legal or illegal immigrants as well as a far
from negligible portion of the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish
labour force—speak loud enough about the reappearance of the
drive for absolute surplus-value, as a most retrograde tendency in the
20th century development of capital, in one of the most privileged
advanced capitalist countries. Needless to say, both the
ruthless pursuit of absolute surplus-value in general and its
particularly obnoxious manifestation in the form of child labour were
always prominent (and, of course, so they remain today) in
‘Third World’ countries.

Paradoxically, the global crisis of capital-accumulation in the age of
advanced globalization creates some major new difficulties, instead of
solving the long contested iniquities of the system, as the
optimistic spokesmen of unproblematical globalization
want us to believe. For the margins of capital's
productive viability are diminishing (hence the drive also for
absolute surplus-value), despite all efforts of the capitalist
states—individually or in concert, like the G7/G8
jamborees—to expand, or to keep steady at least, the
system's productive margins. In actuality there can be only one
way for attempting to enlarge the shrinking margins of
capital-accumulation: at the expense of labour. This is
a strategy actively promoted by the state—indeed, because of
this need the interventionist role of the state has never been
greater28 than in our own time, despite
all neoliberal mythology to the contrary—and the strategy is
objetively underpinned in our time by the tendency for the downward
equalization of the differential rate of exploitation. In the end,
however, the now pursued strategy is bound to fail, provided that the
labour movement succeeds in radically rearticulating its own
strategies and forms of organization, to be oriented toward the
creation of a genuine mass movement, in order to face up to the
historical challenge. For not even the most optimistic
theorists of the IMF and of the other generously funded organs of
capital-apologetics have managed to invent so far, nor are they likely
to do so in the future, a device through which it would be possible to
squeeze out the required ever-increasing purchasing power and the
corresponding capital-accumulation from the ever-worsening economic
conditions and casualized wage packets of the labour force.

3. From the tyranny of necessary labour time to emancipation
through disposable time

How can labour—the structural antagonist of
capital—counter the deteriorating trend inseparable from the
narrowing margin of capital's productive viability?

This question takes us back to the third element of
Rifondazione's quest for securing the 35 hours
working week quoted at the beginning of this lecture: changing
society (per cambiare la società). For
today—as a result of capital's need to unceremoniously claw
back29 even its past concessions, rather
than consenting to new ones—it is quite impossible to realize
even the most immediate and limited objectives of traditional trade
unionism without embarking on the road that leads to a fundamental
social transformation. The radical reconstitution of the socialist
movement is a vitally important part of this process.30

Some of capital's more intelligent representatives, like Dean
Witter—the chief economist and director of global economics for
Morgan Stanley—are willing to confess that the ongoing trends
are more problematical than usually depicted in the propaganda organs
of neoliberalism. In an article published in the Sunday New York
Times, entitled The Worker Backlash, he rejects the
explanation that recent successes were the result of deregulation
and increasing productivity. His own, far more conflict-conscious
and less reassuring explanation is that there has been

a dramatic realignment of the nation's economic pie, with
a much larger slice going to capital and a smaller one going
to labour. Call it a labour-crunch recovery, one that
flourished only because corporate America puts unrelenting
pressure on its work force.31

In truth, not only corporate America puts unrelenting pressure on its
work force but the personifications of capital everywhere do
so. For the reformist achievements of the past were premissed on the
continuing growth of the pie—which appeared under
favourable economic conditions as capital's concessions, although
there could never be a question of realigning the pie in
favour of labour, since capital must always appropriate the
lion's share for itself. Now, due to capital's structural
crisis and to the narrowing margin of the system's productive
viability, it becomes absolutely necessary to realign the
nation's economic pie more than ever in capital's
favour, so as to secure a labour-crunch recovery,
thanks to the passivity and resignation of the labour force. But what
happens when labour refuses to go along with such a ruthless
realignment of the economic pie, because it can no longer afford to do
so, as a result of the increasing hardship imposed by the traditional
or newly invented forms of labour-crunch economy? The
possibilities of realigning even a stationary pie, let alone a
shrinking one, have their well definable limits. Not to forget the
fact that the resignatory inactivity of the labour movement cannot be
simply taken for granted forever in any country, as a matter of
natural necessity. Not even in the capitalistically most advanced
ones. No wonder, therefore, that today even the chief economist of
Morgan Stanley has to speak about The Worker Backlash in the
US, voicing his worries about a possible raw power struggle between
capital and labour, and adding that gone are the days of a
docile labour force that once acquiesced to slash-and-burn corporate
restructuring.32

Naturally, from capital's standpoint there can be no answers to
the question: what kind of alternative to the labour-crunch
economy should be pursued in order to avoid the raw power
struggle between capital and labour. Whatever his misgivings and
worries might be, the chief economist of Morgan Stanley must continue
to advise his firm about the best ways of exploiting the opportunities
of globalized financial speculation, or else he will be quickly
dispatched to more restful pastures with a forceful golden
handshake. From the standpoint of capital there can be truly no
alternative to crunching labour as much as
possible—and more so in situations of emergency—, even if
one perceives some of the dangers implicit in the pursued
socioeconomic course. For in the end there is always the lure of
authoritarian solutions, not only in the US client country of General
Suharto, but also in the advanced capitalist democracies of the
West which helped to put Suharto in power in the first place,
supporting him in every possible way for 32 years, including his
savage military repression of the people, and trying to save his
wretched regime with massive IMF funds even in the last minute before
his demise.

The general promise of solving the crying iniquities and
contradictions of the system has been for a long time—and on the
whole remains today —, that through the benefits of
ever-increasing and globally integrated free trade the
condition of workers will greatly improve all over the world, thanks
to the return of the economy to a situation of undisturbed
capital-expansion, free from the defects of the postwar decades which
ended in inflation and stagnation. The actual signs and economic
indicators, however, point in the opposite direction, a fact at times
acknowledged even by mainstream economists who retain their
belief in the insuperable virtues of the capital system. Thus, to
quote an article reviewing a recent book by such an economist:

Rodrick argues that trade in general, not just low-wage imports,
worsens income distribution. Increased international competition, he
writes, translates into greater elasticity of the domestic
demand for labour. In lay terms, this means that a worker is now
competing with a much larger labour supply. As a result, a small shift
in foreign workers' wages or in the global demand for a product or
service can cause big shifts in the domestic demand for
workers. Labour's greater vulnerability to market fluctuations
undercuts its bargaining position vis-à-vis capital. Therefore,
concludes Rodrik, The first-order effect of trade appears to have
been a redistribution of the enterprise surplus toward employers
rather than the enlargement of the surplus. The evidence,
therefore, tells us that the critics of free trade have been right;
trade is not enlarging wealth, but redistributing it upward.33

And yet, when it comes to the question of alternatives, we get from
Rodrick only pious preaching. Thus, to continue our quote:

Rodrick's politics are at best naïve. He lectures labour and
government to be more responsible, but has nothing to say to
multinational corporate business. … Rodrick writes, Labour
should advocate a global economy that carries a more human face,
but he is silent about the fiercely organized efforts of multinational
business and finance to prevent humane policies from even being
considered by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the
World Trade Organization, and other rule setters for the global
marketplace. This suggests a point of view that is, to put it mildly,
out of touch with the realities of the global political economy.34

Indeed, adopting the standpoint of capital—not only in its
blindly uncritical and most aggressive neoliberal form, but also in
its wishfully liberal reformist varieties—has meant for a very
long time losing touch with the realities of the global political
economy.

The radical novelty of our time is that the capital system is no
longer in a position of conceding to labour anything whatsoever, in
contrast to the reformist acquisitions of the past. The depressing
accommodation, and even wholesale capitulation, of some former working
class parties to the demands of big business interests—for
instance in Britain and in several European countries, but by no means
in Europe alone —: a capitulation to the extent of not only
retaining the authoritarian anti-labour legislation of the last few
decades but also giving key cabinet posts in New Labour, in the
Italian Democratic Left governments and elsewhere to prominent
representatives of corporate capital, speak unequivocally on this
score. (Lord Simon, Lord Sainsbury, Geoffrey Robinson, etc. in
Britain, and similar figures in Germany, France and Italy.) This is
why in the present historical period even the limited and
modest objectives of labour—like the 35 hours working
week—can only be realized by changing society, since
objectively they contest the established socioeconomic and
political order (in other words: the whole system of decision making)
under which the nation's economic pie is produced and
distributed. Under the conditions of capital's structural crisis
this is the objectively unavoidable nature of the socioeconomic
contestation, even if for the time being many representatives of
labour do not conceptualize or articulate it in such terms. And this
is also the reason why liberal and socialdemocratic reformism, which
once upon a time had a powerful ally in capital's expansionary
dynamism, is now condemned to the futility of pious
preaching—from Professor John Kenneth Galbraith's sermons
about The Culture of Contentment (quickly echoed, without the
slightest remedial effect, by Bishops and Archbishops in the Church of
England) to the notion of a labour and government-inspired global
economy with a human face quoted a minute ago. A preaching to
which the personifications of capital cannot possibly listen.

The demand for a significant reduction of the working week has a
fundamental strategic importance. Not only because the underlying
issue profoundly affects and therefore directly concerns every single
worker, manual and intellectual alike, whatever might be the colour of
their collars. Equally, because the issue of facing up to this
challenge is not going to fade away. On the contrary, it is growing in
importance with the passing of every day, and the imperative to do
something meaningful about it cannot be legislated out of existence by
capital's parliamentary personifications in the capitalistically
advanced countries, nor indeed repressed by naked force on the
periphery of capital's global order. In other words, this
is a vital strategic demand for labour because it is
non-negotiable: i.e., it cannot be integrated into the
manipulated pseudo-concessions of the existing order. For it directly
concerns the question of control—an alternative
system of social metabolic control—to which capital is and
must be inimically opposed.

Naturally, the 35 hours working week—even if it could be
genuinely conceded and not deviously nullified in many different ways,
as it is cynically planned or practised already—could not
resolve the monumental and ever-increasing, as well as
socioeconomically grave, unemployment problem. Thus the question that
legitimately arises: why 35 and not 25 or 20 hours per week, which
would make a major difference in this respect? That is the question
that takes us to the heart of the matter.

The radical incompatibilities between the existing social order and
the one in which human beings are in control of their life-activity,
including their liberated time, to be set free by a significant
reduction of the working week, was graphically and painfully
illustrated in Britain through the destruction of the mining
industry. In 1984 the British coal miners waged a heroic struggle, not
for money but in defence of their jobs: a one year long strike that
was defeated through the combined efforts of the government of Mrs
Thatcher—who called the miners the enemy within—and
Neal Kinnock's Labour Party which stabbed them in the back. As a
result, the miners' workforce, which at the time was over 150.000,
has been decimated, to the present figure of less than 10.000, and the
towns and villages of many mining communities have been turned into
the wasteland of dehumanized unemployment. At the time of the
miners' strike the coal mines were still nationalized,
which meant being run with the most ruthless capitalist criteria of
efficiency and authoritarian control by the National Coal
Board, becoming subsequently privatized in a fraction of their
original size. What was highly characteristic of the Coal Board's
way of dealing with the problem of greater efficiency, while
talking about the absolute need for rationalizing the work
requirements of the coal industry, was the fact that the state-run
Board imposed on the miners an almost insane seven days work
schedule at the same time when it was savagely cutting the labour
force under its control. For capital is quite incapable of human
considerations. It knows only one way of managing work-time: by
maximally exploiting the necessary labour time of the
workforce in employment, totally ignoring the available
disposable time in society at large, because it cannot
squeeze profit out of it.

This is what sets insurmountable limits to capital in its way of
addressing the unemployment problem. There is something rather
paradoxical, indeed profoundly contradictory about this. For
capital's productive system de facto creates
superfluous time in society as a whole, on an
ever-increasing scale. Yet it cannot conceivably acknowledge the
de jure existence (i.e., the legitimacy) of such socially
produced surplus-time as the potentially most creative disposable
time we all have, which could be used in our society for the
satisfaction of so much of the now cruelly denied human needs, from
education and health service requirements to the elimination of famine
and malnutrition all over the world. On the contrary, capital must
assume a negative/destructive/dehumanizing attitude towards
it. Indeed, capital must callously disregard the fact that the concept
of superfluous labour, with its superfluous time, in
reality refers to living human beings and possessors of
socially useful—even if capitalistically redundant or
inapplicable—productive capacities.

The concept of disposable time, taken in its positive and liberating
sense, as an aspiration of socialists, appeared well before Marx, in
an anonymous pamphlet entitled The Source and Remedy of the
National Difficulties, published in London almost 50 years
before Marx's Capital, in 1821. In some passages
quoted by Marx this pamphlet offered a remarkable dialectical grasp of
both the nature of the capitalistic productive process and—by
focusing attention on the vitally important categories of
disposable time, surplus labour, and shortened
working day—the possibilities of escaping from its
contradictions. To quote:

Wealth is disposable time and nothing more. … If the
whole labour of a country were sufficient only to raise the support of
the whole population, there would be no surplus labour,
consquently nothing that can be allowed to accumulate as
capital. … Truly wealthy a nation, if there is no
interest or if the working day is 6 hours rather than 12.35

We are slowly catching up with demanding, as our ancestors did in
1821, the 6 hours working day, but we are still very far from
organizing society on the basis of the immeasurably greater
wealth-producing potential of disposable time. Without the
latter, there can be no question of emancipating the working
individuals from the tyranny of fetishistic determinations and crying
iniquities. The realization of even our limited objectives will
require mass mobilization36 of the
employed and unemployed people, guided by solidarity
with the problems we are all bound to share, if not today then
tomorrow. The strategic longer term perspective, which makes feasible
also the realization of the immediate demands, is inseparable from our
awareness of the viability and indeed the ultimate necessity of
adopting the mode of controlling our social metabolic reproduction on
the basis of disposable time. This is the objective to which
our resources need to be dedicated if we care about the unemployment
problem. Only a radical socialist mass movement can adopt the
strategic alternative of regulating social metabolic
reproduction—an absolute must for the future—on the basis
of disposable time. For due to the insurmountable constraints and
contradictions of the capital system, any attempt at introducing
disposable time as the regulator of social and economic
interchanges—which would have to mean putting at the disposal of
the individuals great amounts of free time, liberated through
the reduction of work-time well beyond the limits of even a 20 hours
working week—would act as social dynamite, blowing the
established reproductive order sky high. For capital is totally
incompatible with free time autonomously and meaningfully utilized by
the freely associated social individuals.

Notes

1Underground Economy, The
Nation, January 12/19,
1998, p. 3.

2 Japan Press Weekly, 16 May 1998.

3 István Mészáros, The Necessity of
Social Control, Isaac
Deutscher Memorial Lecture, delivered at the London School of
Economics and Political Science on 26 January 1971. Merlin Press,
London, 1971, pp. 54-55; reprinted in Mészáros, Beyond
Capital, Merlin Press, London 1995 and Monthly Review Press,
New York 1996. Quotation is from pp.889-890.

4While the total number of unemployed
persons registered with
employment exchanges stood at 336 million in 1993, the number
of employed persons in the same year according to the Planning
Commission stood at only 307.6 million, which means that the
number of registered unemployed persons is higher than the number of
persons employed. And the rate of percentage increase of employment is
almost negligible. Sukomal Sen, Working Class of India:
History of the Emergence and Movement 1830-1990. With an Overview up
to 1995, K.P. Bagchi & Co., Calcutta 1997, p. 554.

5Waterloo in Asia?,
The Nation, January 12/19,
1998, p. 4.

US interests are cynically pursued and imposed wherever the
opportunity permits. Thus American officials, who effectively
vetoed the creation of an Asian Regional Fund independent of the IMF,
and therefore of Washington, have also made it known—most
recently in the case of Korea—that no US direct aid will be
forthcoming until the ailing countries acquiesce in IMF demands. So
far, Thai authorities have agreed to remove all limits on foreign
ownership of financial firms and are pushing ahead with legislation to
allow foreigners to own land, long a taboo. Even before it sought help
from the IMF, Jakarta abolished its restrictions on foreign ownership
of publicly traded stock, a move replicated by Seoul when it granted
foreign investors access to the $64 billion long-term, guaranteed
corporate bond market, access they had been seeking for years.
Walden Bello, The End of the Asian Miracle, The
Nation, January 12/19, 1998, p. 19.

6 IMF congratulations, to be sure, mean
very little, if anything, even
in their own terms of reference. Characteristically, when the Thai
economy was headed for trouble, the IMF was still praising the
government's ‘consistent record of sound macroeconomic
management policies’. Walden Bello, The End of the Asian
Miracle, loc. cit., p. 16. Similarly, in the few months since the
IMF rescued the South Korean economy, unemployment has actually
doubled in the country.

7 See Gabriel Kolko's fine book,
Vietnam: Anatomy of a
Peace, Routledge, London and New York, 1997. See also Nhu
T. Le's passionate rejoinder in his review of Kolko's book in
The Nation, Screaming Souls, 3 November 1997.

8 Anthony Kuhn, 268 million Chinese
will be out of jobs in a
decade, The Sunday Times, 21 August 1994.

9 See Lord Beveridge's book of the
same title and his important
role in the establishment of the British Welfare State.

11Jobless told: join Army or lose
benefit by Stephen Castle
(Political Editor), Independent on Sunday, 10 May
1998. Another headline on the same page reports on reactions to the
miserable level at which the minimum wage has been introduced by the
British New Labour government under the title: Union fury as
Labour sets minimum wage at £3.60.

17 Michiyo Nakamoto, Revolution coming,
ready or not,
Financial Times, 24 October 1997. See in the same issue
of the Financial Times an article by John Plender,
When capital collides with labour, written in the same spirit.

18Policy Complementation: The Case for
Fundamental Labour Market
Reform, by David Coe and Dennis Snower. IMF Staff Paper Volume 44,
No. 1, 1997. Reviewed in The Economist, 15 November 1997,
p. 118. Tellingly, the title of the review article is All or
nothing: Piecemeal labour-market reforms will not cure Europe's
unemployment problem. Governments need to go the whole way.

19Japan Press Weekly, 14
February 1998, p. 25. In
another issue of Japan Press Weekly we read: The main
objectives of the bill are to increase the application of
discretionary work schedules, to ease restrictions on the existing
system of varied (flexible) working hours and to make short-term
employment contracts legal. 18 April 1998.

28 The interventionist role of the state
is in evidence both on the
economic and on the political plane. In the economic domain the funds
generously dished out to major capitalist enterprises are measured in
hundreds of millions of pounds. Thus British Aerospace, for instance,
is going to receive nearly £600 millions for one of its ongoing
ventures, in addition to countless millions semi-fraudulently obtained
from the state in the not too distant past, also on an occasion when
the company was pretending to put on sound economic footing the now
again bankrupt Rover enterprise. As to the latter, the massive funds
needed to save Rover today are expected again to be provided by the
state—and no one seems to hail right now the miraculous virtues
of private enterprise—while leaving the profits, of
course, to the capitalist part of the so-called Private Public
Partnerships so much favoured by New Labour. Equally if not more
important is the role of state intervention on behalf of capital on
the political plane. For the capital system badly needs the
authoritarian anti-labour legislation—obligingly introduced by
Conservative and socialdemocratic governments alike (indeed, most
tellingly about the gravity of the system's structural crisis,
even by some governments presided over by former communist parties, as
in Italy)—in order to maintain its neo-liberal rule over
society at the present stage of historical development.

29 As Marshall Berman had put it in his
article quoted in note 10,
crass cruelty calls itself liberalism (we are kicking you and your
kids off welfare for your own good) and you are laid off or
fired—or deskilled, outsourced, downsized. (It is
fascinating how many of these crushing words are quite new.)The Nation, 11 May 1998, p. 16.

30 See a powerful chapter on the challenges
facing the labour
movement: Beyond Labour and Leisure, in Daniel Singer's
book, Whose Millennium?, published by Monthly Review
Press, New York, Spring 1999.

31 Dean Witter, The Worker Backlash,
Sunday New York
Times, quoted in a letter sent to the readers and supporters of
Monthly Review by its Editors in October 1997.

36 The Appeal quoted in Note 27 rightly speaks
of the need to promote a mass mobilization in favour of the 35 hours
week, to affect both the world of work as that of politics, and culture
as much as the world of associations. (promuovere una
mobilitazione di massa a favore delle 35 ore che tocchi il mondo
del lavoro cosi come quello della politica, quello della cultura come
quello delle associazioni.)